The pundits and the politicians who think the U.S. should unconditionally support Israel are committing treason against U.S. My recommendation for them- just abandon your U.S. citizenship and become Israeli citizens.

Those who think a U.S. senator cannot criticize Israel at all should also abandon your U.S. citizenship and become Israeli citizens. I am just glad that most Jewish Americans don't share your sentiment.

Notably absent from this piece is any coverage of Kerry's South American adventures in places like Nicaragua and Honduras. That he favored the Sandinistas/Noriega crowd despite their human rights violation records that were well known at the time. And how he demanded that the Law Library of Congress retract its findings that the Honduran high court acted legally in its ouster of Zelaya. He preferred the Hugo Chavez/Obama Admin description of denying Zelaya's power grab as a coup d'etat.

A full blown Senate hearing complete with questions about his thinking in South America and any plans for NAFTA should make for some interesting fireworks.

Everything suggests that Mr Kerry is an excellent choice to be America's chief diplomat, being the sort of person who thinks twice before he says nothing.
Seriously though, thank god for his commonsense views on Iran.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but John Kerry is the fourth Secretary of State who served in the United States Navy, after Cyrus Vance, Warren Christopher and Edmund Muskie, or the sixth if you include James Baker and George P. Shultz (both USMC).

Kerry was nominated Sectretary of State on 12/21/2012, and his ship when he was serving in the USN as an officer, USS Gridley...

" Some sailors would say that this is a good omen and I would agree with them..."

I am yet to meet a sailor who does not believe in omens of some sort. Well, maybe not publicly. But, yes, it is a good omen for Kerry. I certainly hope that it is an equally good omen for the country, too. We'll know, once he will have brought his ship home safely. I wish him a firm and steady hand on the helm. He will have to navigate some treacherous waters...

Yes. He will have to navigate in a never-ending series of Scyllas and Charybdises. On the Mekong at least there were some stretches of water where there were some friendlies, here and there; but the waters Kerry will have to navigate will offer no respite from those Scyllas and Charybdises. Not even for a moment.

P.S. Yes, Conrad is great. Even in Coppola's interpretation; or especially in his interpretation.
And, of course, Conrad, himself, was a sailor, too...

"Mr Kerry has taken positions on both sides of the hawk-dove divide. On the one hand, he came out for a Libyan no-fly zone, for ditching the Mubarak regime in Egypt and for arming Syrian rebels before the Obama administration. On the other, he has been a leading voice calling for diplomatic engagement with Iran and with Syria's president".

The above-alleged "hawk-dove divide" is misleading. The underlying commonality in Kerry's diplomacy is timidity in the face of Islamist expansionism.

" Mr Kerry is a man who believes that America is exceptional not because we say we are, but because we do exceptional things, the president said."

Mr. Kerry certainly did one exceptional thing: he married an exceptional fortune by marrying a (non-American born) woman who had also married that same exceptional fortune, the American Heinz family fortune.

He does seem better qualified for this post than Mrs. Clinton. Having been in war, and received several shrapnel wounds, at least he understands from first hand experience what it means when failed diplomacy leads to armed conflict.

Of course he'll be confirmed by the Senate. John McCain even referred to "Secretary Kerry" before he was nominated. So why would Lexington "wonder if it is more useful to think of Mr Kerry as a sort of anti-Pawlenty"? Kerry is better qualified for the position than is Susan Rice.

Well, at least a new Secretary of State who can speak a foreign language (French) fluently. The last one was Condi Rice (Russian); and before her, it was Kissinger who could read and write, and carry on a conversation, in a language other than English. Yeah, what is the deal with all these foreigners who don't even have the common courtesy to speak English... ;-)

You don't have to go all the way back to Kissinger. You're forgetting the polyglot Madeleine Albright who went around conducting interviews in numerous languages. Also, Colin Powell apparently speaks some Yiddish, though it is unclear if he can carry a conversation.

I stand corrected. I really should feel embarrassed about that slip, for I, myself, heard her translate for Vaclav Havel. Yes, you are absolutely right. I must confess that, it must have been a subconscious slip on my part, because I just simply did not care for her as a Secretary of State. It is no excuse, of course; and I know it.

No Secretary of State is going to make much of a difference in the current state of the impotence and decline of the United States of America .To speak of American exceptionalism in these circumstances is whistling in the dark. With Susan Rice she would have at least regaled us with the colorful controversies she managed to generate so easily.

I am all for pragmatism and output policy. But I also recognize that sometimes there is a gap between what any decent person could accept and what said person can actually achieve. So on settlement construction for example no US government is ever likely to approve and one cannot have policy entirely ignore this.

Obama unfortunately does not understand that unfortunately, the economy works, evolves and reproduces machines, kills humans in wars, substitutes us in labor and war fields, advances and progresses in brief with steady steps in a clear direction: that of the supremacy of a new super-organism, the company-mother of machines, associated in vast global networks and organized by flows of money, in markets, which act as a collective brain of a planet of corporations, machines, weapons and human workers and consumers. This brave new world is what a true science of economics would explain and a true science of history would manage for the benefit of man. As it is, it is managed automatically by flows of money which build according to the laws of cybernetics and systems sciences, which people like me discovered and resolved in the 90s and 2000s, an entire new 'reality', a 'terraformed' earth, a new ecosystem, where humans are no longer dominant, but company-mothers and their biological will of evolution, reproduction and adaptation of the Earth ecosystem, to its offspring of machines, are. So the life-time of mankind and the planet is dedicated almost exclusively to that future of machines and its complex super-organisms. Guided by profits, neoclassical economics pretends to be a 'mathematical' science, independent of history, uninterested in the collateral effects that the production of machines, money and weapons might cause to mankind. It is my opinion though that the economy should serve mankind first, then profits and finally machines, not the other way around, as it is today. Since we constantly increase productivity and fire labor, to increase profits, resulting in a constant evolution of machines towards the age of the singularity where robotic workers and terminator armies will have made mankind obsolete.

So Obama appoints a super 1% Rich old White guy as the secretary of state, which has not occurred since 1997. FORWARD!!!!!
honestly though could care less, as long as the person is qualified and capable which Kerry is for this position.

Perhaps their snide superciliousness is merely a reflection of envy towards a society which had, for a while, insulated its populace-at-large from the historically usual violence en masse, allowing said culture to be more blithe about temporal bull$#!+. Don't be one of those snide idiots, supamark.

It has nothing to do with ideological disagreement, not everything has to do with simple ideological disagreements, my observation is purely based on their performance up to this date. I do not like Obama's lack of intelligence and vision in his management of international affairs and I have never considered Kerry as anything more than a dilettante. My distrust of these two characters are simply base on my primeval instincts, which has served me well up to now.

Of course I do, I trust and totally rely on my own instincts in all areas of my life, so far it has not failed me in most areas and has been profitable for me. I do my best to be well informed and make my own assessments, my primeval instincts has been very reliable to me when it comes to assessing men and their potentials. Sadly, these two self-serving clowns are not going to help me or my country, what I find surprising is that majority of the people in the world do not see it.

Well, I guess the rest of the world does not necessarily see your personal instincts, nor if they did, would think they should act according to them. What the rest of the world did see though is what Bush Jr did, and that was indeed a clown job that will be difficult to be matched by any future president (or politician, for that matter).

Forgive me for saying this but you comment makes very little sense, of course "the world does not necessarily see (my) personal instincts", they are mine alone. Most informed and decisive people do act on their own instincts, that is what separates them from the herd who are guided by the party they belong to. I was right about Bush too, I did not think much of him either, I did not like his money senses and his lack of diplomatic skills. I believe Obama was elected and reelected for the wrong reasons, he also happened to be very lucky that his opponent was a woman and he followed Bush. Democracy guarantees us that the majority wins but it does not guarantee the majority is clever or right.